This Sunday morning, January 21st, the W7A Arizona SOTA Association will put as many mostly desert SOTA summits on the air as we can muster for the ARRL January VHF Contest. As of January 15th we have commitments from NINE SOTA Activators to be on-the-air Sunday morning starting after 1400 UTC until roughly 1900 UTC. More Activators may yet join in the fun this week, so please looks for us this Sunday morning.
While a lot of the SOTA action will be on VHF/UHF, many stations will also operate HF at some point while on their summits. So please look for us on whatever bands we all end up on!
WX dependent, I plan on being on W7N/TR-013 (Tahoe area), I’ll gladly S2S chase any HF activators I can!(although AZ is not that far of a drive, and I do need to pick up W7A :D)
Well done on getting such an amount of activity lined up Pete. Unfortunately I won’t be able to get up a summit for the HF side of things, but will keep an ear open from the home QTH. Being principally VHF / UHF orientated, I will be with you in spirit and hope it all goes well.
Just a reminder that at least Eleven W7A stations are activating SOTA Summits Sunday morning (Jan 21) in central Arizona in conjunction with the ARRL VHF Contest. All will operate VHF and UHF bands, and most will also activate HF at some point from their summits. Hopefully this will introduce many VHF/UHF operators to SOTA as well as the concept of portable VHF Contest operating. It also should result in a large number of s2s contacts for all SOTA participants.
Bottom line is that a good time should be had by one and all.
The W7A (Arizona) Mega Activaton day went off as planned on Sunday, January 21st. We planned this event to coincide with the ARRL January VHF Contest, and we thought it might be fun, and we were right.
Thirteen Arizona Activators were on Summits simultaneously Sunday Morning, and it was extremely busy to say the least. It looks like the SOTA Activators made over 600 VHF/UHF QSO’s on 50, 144, 223, and 432 MHz, and every log was filled with s2s contacts. The logging was fast and furious and I heard rumors of “smoking pencils” during the peak hours of the event.
I managed to make 124 VHF/UHF contacts, working 12 SOTA Activators, and making 31 s2s contacts. Other Activators had similar results. We won’t know the final results for a while from all of the participants…seems some of us were worn out a bit by hiking up to their summits with radios, batteries, antennas (yagis on four bands in some cases), masts, the and cold weather gear.
The local VHF contesters told us this was the busiest January VHF event maybe ever in Arizona, and SOTA had a lot to do with that. So congrats to all and maybe we can get twenty summits on the air next year!